America’s tech giants provide essential and beloved services to billions of people around the clock. They play fundamental roles in how life is lived in the modern age. They also profess to be responsible, not cavalier, about their power and the breadth of their impact. Yet these companies face increasing — and deserved — criticism for their behavior.

Apple has long held itself up as a principled force for good, with CEO Tim Cooksniping at other companies for what he sees as their lax commitment to user privacy. But the Silicon Valley company’s passivity in response to a shocking technical glitch is unfathomable. Last month, Grant Thompson, a 14-year-old from Arizona, found that he could use FaceTime — Apple’s video chatting software — to eavesdrop on others’ iPhones. When Thompson added a second person to a group FaceTime call, he received audio and video from the first person he called — even if the call was never picked up.

His mother notified Apple on Jan. 20, sending Apple support a video of what she called a “major security flaw.” When Apple support didn’t respond, she emailed and faxed Apple’s security team. While she got a pro forma response from Apple, it wasn’t until Jan. 28 that Apple acted to fix a problem that exposed tens of millions of Apple users to severe invasions of their privacy. The company only chose to do so after 9to5mac.com, a website devoted to news about Apple, published a post about the flaw.

That’s absurd. Does Apple just takes complaints about huge security problems seriously if they make headlines? As cybersecurity expert Patrick Wardle told The New York Times, “If these kinds of bugs are slipping through, you have to wonder if there are other problematic bugs that other hackers are exploiting that should have been caught.”

As bad as that was, Apple’s mistake didn’t seem as morally fraught as Facebook’s. Internal documents disclosed as a result of a class-action lawsuit showed that for years, the company allowed developers to structure games including Angry Birds, Petville, Wild Ones and Barn Buddy in ways that let children run up hundreds of dollars of charges or more on their parents’ credit cards without their parents’ knowledge — then refused to provide refunds. The documents showed Facebook knew what was going on — calling it, incredibly, “friendly fraud” — and welcomed the revenue from the scam.

Facebook says it revised refund rules in 2016 to address this problem. But it didn’t respond to questions from the Ars Technica website about why it engaged in such a shabby practice. Sens. Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, sent a letter Tuesday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding an explanation as to why his company “manipulated children into spending their parents’ money without permission.” They asked for a response by Feb. 19.

Good luck with that. As NBC News and others reported last fall, Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, blamed the media and Facebook’s press office for critical reports on the company’s covering up the extent of Russia’s use of Facebook to spread disinformation.

Executives’ indifference to issues like this should invite more scrutiny, from consumers and Congress.